Spilled coffee and Liszt
by constantinterruptions
Summary: AU. Shikamaru and Temari bond over classical music


X

Shikamaru met her like the way he met most strangers, walking on the street with a stack of score sheets in his hand and his head amongst the clouds, dreaming of looking at more clouds on the roof of the university building. So far, it'd been pretty much a perfect day for him, after all he had already convinced Asuma to finally use Litzst as a piece for the showcase as he had carefully put it, 'an aesthetic decision to illustrate the evolution of music from the superficially ostentatious to something as refined as Debussy'. He was glad that he come up with something like that up on the fly, it seemed to please his tutor. The real reason he had chosen Liszt in the first place was simply because he knew the composer and most of his works by heart and it was this familiarity which made him more than comfortable to play his works in front of a whole crowd of pompous literati who thought that Liszt was more bark than bite.

He strained his eyes into the distance, almost able to make out his usual spot, when something unexpected rammed into the side of his body. Shikamaru let out a sharp yelp as hot coffee or tea or whatever spilt on to his shirt and his papers. His score sheets flung themselves out of his grasp and fluttered away, landing with grace on the pavement next to him, very much unlike the blonde heap which had begun cursing. The first thought that entered his mind was Asuma's anger when he realized that Shikamaru had damaged his precious scoresheets (again).

"Watch where the fuck you're going buddy," the blonde intoned. Shikamaru shrunk back, he immediately knew that this woman was more than troublesome, the look that she wore on her face akin to a scowl, the coarse vocabulary and the critically piecing green eyes was more than enough to convince him. The blonde shook her head as she lifted her body up from the ground. Her reddened cheeks clashed against the messily pinned up dirty blonde hair which fell against her face. What a sight, he thought, pity it wasn't a good one.

"Do you have to be so aggressive?" he asked, rolling his eyes, "it was an accident."

"You ruined my term paper!" the blonde shrieked, shoving what seemed like a coffee stained binded stack of papers in his face. "Now I have to reprint this and I'm going to be late, I swear to god, if I get fucking expelled because of this, it's all your fault."

Shikamaru's mouth began to stretch into a grin, he was rather amazed by the blonde's ability to continue ranting in one continuous run-on sentence while not losing any breath. And what made the urge to laugh even more prevalent was the coffee that seemed to flow along the sweat lines which meandered down her shirt. He watched as the blonde's spine seemed to stiffen as she let out a feral growl.

"What the hell are you laughing at."

"You," he shot back. "You spilt coffee on my papers too and look," he gestured towards the pile of brown stained papers on the concrete pavement, "they're everywhere." He hoped that the irony of the situation would alleviate the blonde's anger and calm her down somewhat. Women were troublesome to deal with especially in the middle of the afternoon.

"I'm not going to help you," the blonde near shrieked, "you knocked into me." Collecting herself, she straightened her dark blouse and tore a page off one of the notebooks she had been carrying, scribbling something upon it. Shikamaru looked at the blonde in interest.

_What an ugly face. _ He thought. Okay, maybe it was not ugly per se but the scowl which lit up her features sure made it seem so, it made her green-blue eyes seem beady and calculative and it made her mouth look like a sickle that she seemed to want to draw across his throat. If only she would smile. Women would be a lot less troublesome if they smiled more and nagged less.

"Here," the blonde called to him, breaking him out of his reverie. He reached out for the piece of paper which she held out to him with an obviously quizzical look on his face. "You're paying for my dry-cleaning, contact me by Tuesday next week." She smiled a smile that could have stilled a thousand galloping hordes not by its beauty but by the menace hidden in it. Then, she drifted past him gracelessly with a smirk which screamed superiority.

"Troublesome woman," Shikamaru muttered as he picked up his coffee stained score sheets and looked at the sky for direction. Asuma was going to have his head.

X

The second time he met her was before the Tuesday he was supposed to give her the money that he supposedly owed her for dry-cleaning her clothes. He had been dragged by Ino and Choji to a party. A party held by Naruto and Kiba of all people, which meant that it included uncomfortably loud music about sex and certain portions of a woman's anatomy, too many people and of course alcohol. Ino had gone for the supposedly hot boys who Naruto knew from the sociology department. Choji had gone because of Kiba's amazing albeit hidden culinary ability. And he had just been dragged along amidst Ino's shrill pleas of concretizing an eighteen year old friendship. Now while Shikamaru doubted that watching one of his best friends gyrating and grinding her body against a series of young, good looking men, while watching the other mope and pine for said first best friend via bingeing on barbequed meats and vodka was hardly going to aid his friendship in anyway, however he still went, mainly because Ino was very troublesome when she was upset.

So from the time he entered Naruto's spacious apartment, he plonked himself on the couch and began nursing a beer, hoping that other people would take this as a sign that he was an anti social recluse who wanted to be left alone. He was wrong.

"Hey Shikamaru," a drunk Kiba who was being straddled by an attractive brunette, slurred, as he slumped on to the couch and began passionately making out with the woman who seemed to be attached to his hip, twining against his torso like a vine.

Shikamaru glanced awkwardly at the couple in heat next to him and closed his eyes. He hated parties. The food was taken by everyone else, the smell of weed which permeated throughout the apartment made him nauseous and the music made him his head ring. After all he had never understood the attractiveness of listening to mass produced music made more grating by the synthetic beats and the synths added to mask the fact that the singer could hardly sing.

Fuck this, he thought, he was going to get another beer and then he was going on to the fire escape to escape the pot fumes which numbed his brain. Sauntering towards the kitchen, he noticed a familiar figure standing in front of the beers.

The tall, slim figure of a woman with dishwater blonde hair. He groaned inwardly as he made his way towards her, hoping that his non-descript features would mask the fact that he had pissed her off just a few days ago.

He had never been so wrong.

"You!" the familiarly grating voice shrieked. "You're the guy who spilt coffee on me."

"For the record,"Shikamaru returned, "I did not spill coffee on you, you did that by yourself."

"Whatever buddy, you owe me ten dollars." He could almost hear her grin, a self-assured smirk which would probably cause her to look even more fiendish. She could have been a boogeyman if she wanted to, she looked like she could eat children alive.

"Fine," he sighed, reaching to his wallet and taking out a ten dollar bill. The blonde gratefully snatched it out of his hands and stuffed it into the pocket of her jeans. "Now if you don't mind," he continued, "I want a beer."

The blonde looked at him with her connivingly manipulative green-blue eyes, a mouth curved into a sickle. She watched hawkishly as he grabbed a beer bottle and opened the kitchen window to move out to the fire escape.

"You know, you're going to get hypothermia out there." She called, her voice turning sweetly musical like a Schubert tune. Sarcasm was literally dripping out of her voice and she was being excessively ironic, it was the middle of summer for goodness' sake. He ignored her and jumped out of the window, landing on the metal stairwell with a jangle.

"What are you even doing?" The blonde persisted after him, ignoring the fact that he was ignoring her. Shikamaru turned around to face her through the window, a pertinent scowl on his face. How difficult was it going to be for him to just be alone with the clouds and sky and stars.

"I want to look at the sky." Shikamaru secretly hoped that the somewhat true and dour response would dampen the blonde's hopes of creating conversation with him and finally allow him to be alone but he was wrong. For the third time today, he was proven wrong again.

Instead, the blonde clambered out the window with a beer in hand and a feline grace which rivalled any cat he had seen, landing softly next to him. Shikmaru bit back a remark about her being a graceless hag when they first met and instead chose to sit down next to her.

She too sat down next to him and watched him watch the sky. Shikamaru tried to ignore her piercing gaze, it was uncomfortable, he felt almost too hot and bothered to realize that he could see Orion's belt clearly for the first night in weeks. The atmosphere was too tense, asphyxiating even. For the first time since he had almost lost a chess match in third grade, he felt that the silence that he had long lusted for was merely sickeningly uncomfortable.

Finally she broke the silence.

"So kid, what's your name." It came more as a statement than a question and the authoritative tone through which she ordered him to give her his name like a general giving a common soldier orders made him realize that she was more troublesome than he could actually handle. So he gave her his name, albeit reluctantly.

"Shikamaru Nara?" The blonde's forehead crinkled, she looked lost in thought, almost as if she had heard his name before. About two seconds later, she snapped her fingers, a cliché old gesture which he smirked at.

"You're the 18 year old musical prodigy who got into the program at 17 on that fully paid scholarship."

There is a trace of awe in her voice that warms Shikamaru's belly. This of course surprises him, he assumed that he had been immune and impervious to any form of commendation after having being so highly praised as a child. Furthermore, there was natural reason for her to be surprised. The Harvard music program was a rigorous and prestigious one, one of the most prestigious ones in the world and the fact that he could get in this young was more than impressive. The blonde seemed to study his prone posture for a while before bursting out in a short bark of laughter.

"What." He grumbled angrily.

"You don't seem like a music prodigy, you don't look like the type who will slave away at a piano to write sonatas by candlelight." The derisive snort she made, made him laugh along as well and nod in agreement.

"I'm not. I'm just lucky that Asuma saw me perform at a school assembly and forced me to apply here."

The blonde smiled, a sad glint soon entered her eyes. Shaking her head, she muttered.

"You geniuses really do have it easy."

Shikamaru turned to look away from her, there was a prideful and painful look to her face which seemed so tragic, the blonde monstrosity seemed almost beautiful. The moonlight cast a glow over her dirty blonde hair and made her seem like a martyred saint, her green-blue eyes glinted not with malice but with pride and a richness which he could not describe. This was a look which made men write sonatas and operas and arias. He felt like a child in her presence. So he did what was natural to him whenever intimidated, he escaped by changing the subject.

"And who are you?"

He watched her watch him, her green-blue eyes drilling into his with an intensity which rivalled none. She looked like she was weighing up the odds of whether or not to reveal her identity and struggling with it. Closing her eyes, she let out a sigh and a name.

"Temari Sabaaku," she looked at him with expectation. "If you're going to say anything about my brother or my father, I've heard it all and if you dare say shit about Gaara, I will punch you in the throat."

Shikamaru laughed. He had heard things about both Rasa Sabaaku and Gaara Sabaaku, some good, most bad. Rasa Sabaaku he had heard was a cut-throat businessman, a soon-to-be Jordan Belfort, wolf of wall street type, who had a part to play in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme and eventually killed himself so he could escape jail, leaving his three children aged 16,15 and 13 orphaned. As for Gaara, the genius of the Sabaaku family, Shikamaru had heard of both his genius and his supposed schizophrenia which acted up especially when the boy refused medication. These nuggets of information were of course inconvenient bits of truth which he knew would make Temari smash the bottle she was gripping, so tight it turned her knuckles moon white, against his head and so he said something else.

"Gaara's a pretty good chess player."

It was the truth, he had faced Gaara before at a regional tournament. Gaara was precise, controlled and unpredictable. It had felt like he had been playing two people instead of one. Sometimes Gaara had been cautious and strategic, other times he made gambles which had even Shikamaru shocked. And while Shikamaru still ended up winning the game, it had been a long, hard and arduous match which he had never expected from the young boy with the shock of blood red hair and what looked like a gang symbol carved into the side of his forehead.

Temari let out a short bark of laughter and gave a smile, a genuine one this time, almost as if she had never heard something so conciliatory about her younger brother.

"He's a good kid, he just has problems…" She trailed off with her understatement and began anew, "by the way, I handed in my report."

"And…"

Temari gave a smile which showed off her canines, she seemed so wild and feral sometimes.

"My prof liked it? Gaara isn't the only smart one in the family."

Shikamaru gave her a pointed gaze and rolled his eyes.

"Intelligence is found in humility, you know." To which Temari let out another laugh and then began pointing out constellations to him. He sat next to her sometimes interjecting when he heard what he thought was a misidentified constellation and then arguing with her, almost as if they were old friends and not people who just learned each other's names an hour ago.

X

The third time he met her, it was a Tuesday almost two months since their last meeting. During this period of time, he had been cooped up in the music studio or his room, practicing Liszt. Meanwhile, Asuma had been disappointed with his performance, a first in his life, which made him feel both disconcerted and disillusioned about his so-called prodigious talent. So disillusioned he had actually begun practicing, hard.

Tired from another night of endless practicing, Shikamaru lugged his dead weight to a Chinese place near the university and slumped down at a table, waiting patiently for the waitress to notice his prone and unfamiliar figure and finally ask for his order. Instead, what he heard was far from pleasant, he heard Temari's voice.

"Hey, are you dead?" this statement was of course accompanied with a sharp jab to the ribs. He groaned, which she must have taken as an invitation, as he heard a chair screech next to him. A sharp thwack to his head caused him to stir and he turned to look at her.

She had changed a little in those two months. This time her hair was let down and seemed longer, more feminine in fact. Her eyes seemed calmer but as critical as ever as they surveyed him. And as he glanced to what she was wearing, he was shocked by the short shorts which she wore which accentuated her tanned legs.

"Stop gawking idiot and order, I'm hungry." She demanded, as if expecting him to be absolutely comfortable with the fact that she had just materialized out of thin air.

"Where did you come from?" he mumbled as he watched her wave an impatient arm towards a tired waiter, while cursing under her breath.

"From heaven, dumbass. Where did you think I came from? The university of course, the law building isn't that far from here. And by the way I've spent the past two weeks arguing with idiots over freaking punctuation marks and semantics, so I'm grouchy and hungry."

Stupid un-understanding classmates of Temari. Did they really have to irritate her to the extent that she was going to take out all her rage and anger on to him? What had he even done to deserve this? The anger of a troublesome woman was more annoying and troublesome than usual especially when on considered his failure.

He watched tiredly as she smiled a Cheshire cat smile to the waiter, shifting from her initial anger into calm composition, pointing towards what she wanted. How charming, was she like Gaara, bipolar? A few swift jabs of her wrist towards the menu with such force that he was shocked that it did not puncture the flimsy sheet of paper.

"You didn't order for me." The statement came out of his mouth before he could stop it. Indeed, the lack of sleep was addling his brain, it prevented his regular cognitive functions from controlling the stupid things which his head thought such that women, especially troublesome women like the blonde seated could hear them and have another reason to be angry.

"I ordered for the both of us," Temari said with a rebellious toss of her head.

Typical, she was bossy and controlling, just like his mother. She had just appeared out of nowhere and now expected him to accede to all of her demands which included what to eat. What if he didn't like what she ordered? Did she actually know what was good in this restaurant? These questions circled around his head but again he said nothing for fear of her anger.

"So how have you been doing?" Temari leaned towards him and snapped her fingers in front of his glassy eyes. He was really tired, sleep was elusive, the clouds in the autumn sky seemed drawn out and darker than usual and the recital's date loomed ahead without any possibility of him mastering Liszt by that time.

"Terrible."

Great, he was now pouring out the worries of his life to a girl he hardly knew. However, the short one word response made Temari jolt up in her seat. He watched as her face rearranged itself into what seemed like maternal care. He almost laughed, maternal and Temari seemed more like antonyms than anything else. She put a hand on to his arm, urging him to go on. Shikamaru could feel the calloused tips of her fingers against his skin. He wondered if the callouses were formed via strenuous guitar or violin playing.

And so he told her. He poured out the difficulty it was to master the superficial ostentatiousness of Liszt. How even though he got the notes right, the quality of the sound wasn't as beautiful as what was expected of him. The pomp and the grandeur only echoed dully in the notes, there was just something in it that he was failing to capture.

"And I'm supposed to be a genius," he remarked ironically. The weight of the world seemed to bearing on his shoulders, the expectations seemed endless and he had or was going to disappoint everyone.

"Jesus aren't you a crybaby." Temari stretched her legs out, seeming more catlike than ever, "look, my brother plays the piano and shit, I know a bit about Liszt. I'll help you with it later."

Shikamaru stared at her. The woman must have been either drunk or insane, she hardly understood the complexities of classical music and yet she wanted to help him? Him, who was considered the genius of the music college and had dedicated more than three quarters of his life to the piano. This was either insanity or hubris.

"Don't look so shocked crybaby," she snarled. The familiar tone of derision entered her voice once again. "Shouldn't you of all people know that playing the piano is more than just thumping away on the keyboard."

He nodded slowly. Asuma had once told him about it. The voice of his teacher repeated itself in his skull, the same critique that he had been issuing shikamaru since the start of rehearsals for the recital. _Your performance lacks depth. _ Shikamaru had initially assumed that it meant that the tonality of his performance was lacking and subpar and merely resorted to enunciating the tones within the piece, the fortes hence became louder, the piános became softer. However Asuma had merely repeated the same critique that he had issued for the previous times. And Shikamaru had naturally became despondent with each critique, he had never tried so hard and failed so badly.

However as he was hungry for success, he followed Temari back to her home after their quick and over-seasoned meal at the restaurant. Passing through the door of her home, he was greeted by lavender walls and a confusion of clothes, papers and books. The mess which constituted Temari's home, which resulted in the table being littered with both her intimates along with her books made him more than uncomfortable. After all, it was rather easy to picture her in a lacy black bra, pinning her against the door frame as she moaned against his touch and said his na-

"Here," Temari dragged him to a piano, "play."

The piano was, of course, battered and covered with law books and dissertations, typical, the woman was as messy and windswept as they came. Weren't women supposed to be neat? Temari glared at the mess and merely swept the papers away with a graceful wave, relocating them to the cold marble floor. Pushing him towards the seat, she forced him to sit down and gestured impatiently towards the piano for him to play.

And so he did. He played the way that he always did, his fingers running across the keyboard like an old lover, familiarizing itself with the new terrain amidst the familiarity of the black and white keys. He fused with the piano and was almost enraptured when Temari began clapping.

"I think that's bloody great." She smiled her patented feral grin, and sat next to him on the stool. "I could never play like that in a million years, you have some talent."

Shikamaru laughed, it had been so long since he had heard affirmation. And hearing validation come out from one of the most disagreeable and demanding people he had ever met made him feel somewhat more confident about his ability as a pianist. However amidst his pride, he noticed Temari chewing her lip, almost trying to figure out what to say next.

"Just say it," he told her, his eyes narrowing into slits, "I don't like being patronized."

Temari's eyes widened with shock and annoyance, her hands shot up defensively.

"Hey, I still think you play bloody great but you are lacking an understanding of Liszt. Your music is way too lighthearted and comfortable for it to be Liszt."

Shikamaru looked at her pointedly as she struggled to explain.

"You know that Liszt was played with insecurities his whole life right? Being uneducated and compared to other people like Chopin and the rich smart kids he used to run around right? That's the tone you've got to have. Pride at being great, while being insecure for fearing that you're not great enough."

Temari paused to look at the boy in front of her. He was three years younger than her and his jaw was hanging slack from the realization that what she had said was actually helpful. And she wasn't even the music prodigy.

"How do you know all of this?" he struggled to stammer out the sentence, shocked at her supposed understanding of Liszt.

Temari smiled at him and he noted the deepening lines around her eyes and the sad smile that came upon her face as she answers him.

"Because I understand what Liszt feels on a daily basis. It's hard to not be a genius."

X

The fourth time he saw her, it was to thank her. The recital went without a hitch and Asuma had told him to expect good reviews from the dramatic turn around that he had given with the performance which had apparently revolutionized music. This was all the usual bullshit that Asuma liked giving but the satisfaction of mastering a master meant more to the boy than any critical and snarky remark that he could have thought of.

At the after-recital party, he sat drinking at the place of honour at the table while the rest of his fellow classmates chattered aimlessly around him, ignoring the fact that they were all under 21 and merely badgering Asuma to buy them all the rounds. Their professor was of course too happy to not oblige and slammed his master card on the table as he told the rest of them to forge his signature should he fall black out drunk.

Shikamaru was enjoying this scene when he felt his phone vibrate. Picking it up, he answered the unknown caller.

"Hello?"

"Hi! Guess who." The smug voice with a catlike grin rang over from the other side of the line and Shikamaru felt himself smiling too.

"I don't know? Are you that unreasonable bitch that slammed into me and demanded that I pay for her dry cleaning?" He teased and hearing the short laugh from the other end, knew that she was amused too.

"Name's Temari, asshole. You should be thanking me for helping you with your recital. Kankurou says that you played so well that you made angels cry."

The praise made his stomach feel warm but it could have just been the alcohol. Self-consciously he touched his face, only to realize that he had been grinning like an idiot.

"You owe me a meal."

Her impetuous voice made it seem like a demand. She sounded like a child compared to the stoic and collected woman that he had met two weeks ago. He couldn't help smiling a bit more at the image of her throwing a tantrum.

"Sure, when do you want it," he replied, almost relieved that he was going to see her again. After all, he didn't like debts hanging over his head.

"Tomorrow night." And she hung up with a click. Or a satisfied smirk. He could imagine both decorating her face, almost as if she had finished a winning move in chess.

"You're so whipped," Asuma let out a bellowing laugh next to him, which encouraged the rest of his classmates to chortle along. And so Shikamaru did what he did in uncomfortable situations, he blushed and tried to change the topic.

The next evening, he met her at her apartment with bags of Chinese takeout. And amidst complaints about how messy it was and how purple was a colour similar to pink which could make people go mad, he walked up the stairs with her to her home.

He brushed aside the papers that cluttered her sofa and sat on the fabric, ignoring the fact that he hated the clutter. And she joined him, laughing at how cheap he was to buy Chinese takeout for the woman who had helped him stage a performance of a lifetime. Secretly, he thought that her laughing was something more musical than he could have created on stage, it was deep and sensual, almost masculine but with feminine undertones which made him uncomfortably warm.

After their dinner, they talked through the night. And Shikamaru asked all the questions he had been dying to ask her, about her brothers, her mother, her law degree. And he learnt so much about her, he learnt about how she choked on her first blowjob at fifteen, how she had found her mother swinging from the noose which killed her when she was fourteen, how she had no childhood friends because her father's rigorous homeschooling programme until she was 15 safely ensured that she was in no place to meet anyone.

Meanwhile, he told Temari everything about him. From the chess tournaments which had initially made him want to become a grandmaster but then later give up on it simply because the Naras were not rich enough to sustain their son's livelihood if he went into playing chess competitively, to how he had been forced into some band as an extra-curricular and the teachers had realized his talent, to how he had never kissed a girl.

The last one made her widen her eyes with shock. Shikamaru was not that ugly, she thought, plus he could be quite charming if he actually tried, not that he tried very often. Hence she did what a normal friend would do, she helped him out. Leaning in, she gently caught his lips and tried to prevent the waves of nausea and anticipation that engulfed her when she finally did.

X

The fifth time he saw her, he came prepared with a Liszt album. Running his fingers through his long, unkempt hair, he secretly wondered how long it would be before the troublesome woman realized that she was late and would actually arrive.

It took her fifteen minutes.

He passed her the album nonchalantly, pretending that he had just carelessly picked it out of nowhere and that it was not a purposefully chosen one.

"Which one is this?" Temari asked.

"Liszt's Poetic and Religious Harmonies," he replied without missing a bit, wondering if she understood the subtext of his words.

"The one that he wrote while at his lover's chateau and where all the sex made him creative as all hell?"Temari's lip quirked into a smile, "is that a proposition?"

Shikamaru muttered something unintelligible and they walked towards wherever they were supposed to be going, their hands brushing against each other's continuously as they began arguing on the purpose of something or another.

End.

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><p>Reviews are always appreciated!<p> 


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